respond to that absurd advisory. “Please, I’m an American,” he said. “A doctor. I’m just trying to get home to—”
“You’re a doctor?” The pilot’s tone suddenly changed.
“I am.”
“A medical doctor?”
“Yes.”
The pilot cast a look at his companion, then back at Henry. “Come aboard, sir. We got some folks that really need a doctor.”
Henry swam to the ladder in the stern. As soon as he got out of the water, he began to shiver, whether from the cold or from the fear that he had held at bay until now. The other officer handed him a life vest as the pilot gunned the boat and sped toward the base, faster than any boat Henry had ever been in. His teeth chattered uncontrollably.
“Sir, see that submarine?” the pilot said. The sub was large, gray, sleek, and whale-like, with a fin improbably rising from its head like a metal cross. “It’s headed to Kings Bay. They’ve been requesting medical assistance, but they are forbidden to enter the base.”
“Kings Bay, Georgia?” Henry said. It seemed like a miracle.
“There’s Kongoli on board.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
“Your choice, sir. But it’s deadly.”
All Henry could think was that he was finally going home.
34
Snapdragons
Jill had been dead for a week before Helen finally summoned the nerve to bury her. She waited until Teddy was asleep, then went to the backyard to dig the grave. She couldn’t believe how hard it was. The deeper she dug, the more unyielding the soil became. Then she ran into a huge tree root that stopped everything. She sat in the grass and wept. The hole was so shallow. When she stood in it, the surface was not even level with her knee.
It was really dark outside. The neighbors’ lights were off. Helen hadn’t seen anyone other than Teddy in days. She wanted help, but she didn’t know whom to ask. Maybe no one will ever help me again, she thought. Maybe everybody’s dead. I’ll just have to be the grown-up that I’m not ready to be. She was furious with her parents—Henry for being absent and Jill for being dead, leaving her to tend to Teddy and now this.
Her father was surely dead, too. He had betrayed her, tricked her into thinking that he would never fail her, but then he had vanished. “We never heard from him again.” That’s what she would tell people one day. The phrase went through her head like a song she couldn’t shake.
There was a time when Helen was embarrassed by her father. She became conscious of how other people looked at him. Helen was beautiful—this was a defining fact of her life. Henry was not. Helen wanted to stand apart, to be seen as wholly beautiful and well made, not attached to someone pitiable. Henry understood. He gave her room in public to be separate from him, and his nobility is what finally broke her heart. She cried, thinking how much she loved him, ashamed that she ever had felt embarrassed by him. Now he was gone, and she wouldn’t have the chance to make it up to him. She hated herself for despising his infirmities. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be alive and not be perfect. And yet on the inside, she was ugly. Inside, she was small and deformed and her father was tall and beautiful. The smartest man in the world.
But he hadn’t saved Jill.
Digging her mother’s grave became the most important thing Helen had ever done. If she could do that, she might be able to survive. She would be the kind of person who could do adult things like digging a real grave, a grave that animals could not easily unearth. That thought gave her the creeps.
She found an ax in the garage and began hacking at the tree root with a fury and determination that seemed to come from someplace she had never known about. She was vaguely aware that she was sobbing. The root was the diameter of her head. At first she just struck it again and again in the same place, but then she recalled Henry chopping firewood. He had showed her how to tilt the ax head slightly to the right and then to the left, so that the ax made a V in the wood. Chips flew until she collapsed in exhaustion.
She looked at the root with hatred. It was standing in the way of what she needed to do. It was unfair. It was too big a challenge. She would